Bulleh Shah - Aik Alif

1.
Parh parh ilm te faazil hoya
Te kaday apnay aap nu parhya ee na

(You read to become
all knowledgeable
But you never read yourself)

You read so many books
to know it all,
yet fail to ever read your
heart at all.

Bhaj bhaj warna ay mandir maseeti
Te kaday mann apnay wich warya ee na

(You run to enter temples and mosques
But you never entered your own heart)

You rush to holy shrines to play a part,
Would you dare enter the shrine of your heart

Larna ay roz shaitaan de naal
Te kadi nafs apnay naal larya ee na

(Everyday you fight Satan
But you never fight your own Ego)

You are quick to attack the evil one,
yet pride is a battle you have not won.

Bulleh Shah asmaani ud-deya pharonda ay
Te jera ghar betha unoon pharya ee na

(Bulleh Shah you try grabbing that which is in the sky
But you never get hold of What sits inside you)

You grab for a star you can control,
yet fail to grasp the light in your soul.

Bas kareen o yaar
(Stop it all my friend)

Let the race end, my friend

Ilm-oun bas kareen o yaar
Ik Alif teray darkaar

(Stop seeking all this knowledge my friend
Only an Alif is what you need)

Stop trying to be the one who knows,
for ‘God is One’ you need to know.

Bas kareen o yaar
(Stop it all my friend)

End the race, my friend

Allah Sayyaan Allah Sayyaan
(God is the Master, God is All)

God is All we need! God is All!

Nee main jaanaa Jogi de naal

(I shall follow the Yogi {ascetic/sufi})

Follow the wandering dervish!

Jo naa jaane, Haqq ki taaqat
Rabb naa devey us ko Himmat

(Those who deny the Strength of Truth
Lord does not give them courage)

If you deny the power of all that’s true,
God will not grant strength to you.

Hum Mann ke darya mein doobey
Kaisi nayya? Kya manjhdhaar?

(We have drowned in the river of Self
the boat and the flowing waters do not matter)

We are lost in this river of self,
no boat or streams are of any help.

Bas kareen o yaar
(Stop it all my friend)

End the race, my friend

Ilm-oun bas kareen o yaar
(Stop seeking all this knowledge my friend)

Stop trying to know it all, my friend.

Allah Sayyaan Allah Sayyaan
(God is the Master, God is All)

God is All we need! God is All!

- English Translation and Lyrics originally in Punjabi | English in bracket is approximate literal translation. A more poetic rendering in bold by Naomi.

Nisargadatta Maharaj - The Nisargadatta Song of Beyond I Am

The Nisargadatta Song of Beyond I Am: Selections from I Am That

...you are not this, there is nothing of yours in this, except the little point of 'I am' ... . 'I am this, I am that' is dream, while pure 'I am' has the stamp of reality on it. You have tasted so many things -- all came to naught. Only the sense 'I am' persisted -- unchanged. Stay with the changeless among the changeful, until you are able to go beyond.

When the 'I am myself' goes, the 'I am all' comes. When the 'I am all' goes, 'I am' comes. When even 'I am' goes, reality alone is...

By knowing what you are not, you come to know your Self. The way back to your Self is through refusal and rejection. One thing is certain: the real is not imaginary, it is not a product of the mind. Even the sense 'I am' is not continuous, though it is a useful pointer; it shows where to seek, but not what to seek. Just have a good look at it. Once you are convinced that you cannot truthfully say anything except 'I am', and that nothing that can be pointed at, can be your Self, the need for the 'I am' is over -- you are no longer intent on verbalizing what you are. All you need is to get rid of the tendency to define yourself. All definitions apply to your body only and to its expressions. Once this obsession with the body goes, you will revert to your natural state, spontaneously and effortlessly. ... . We discover it by being earnest, by searching, enquiring, questioning daily and hourly, by giving one's life to this discovery.

That in which consciousness happens, the universal consciousness or mind, we call the ether of consciousness. All the objects of consciousness form the universe. What is beyond both, supporting both, is the supreme state, a state of utter stillness and silence. Whoever goes there, disappears. It is unreachable by words, or mind. You may call it God, or Parabrahman, or Supreme Reality, but these are names given by the mind. It is the nameless, contentless, effortless and spontaneous state, beyond being and non-being.

Perfection is a state of the mind, when it is pure. I am beyond the mind, whatever its state, pure or impure. Awareness is my nature; ultimately I am beyond being and non-being.

The idea -- 'I am the witness only' will purify the body and the mind and open the eye of wisdom. Then man goes beyond illusion and his heart is free of all desires. Just like ice turns to water, and water to vapour, and vapour dissolves in air and disappears in space, so does the body dissolve into pure awareness (chidakash), then into pure being (paramakash), which is beyond all existence and non-existence.

One thing is quite clear to me: all that is, lives and moves and has its being in consciousness; and I am in and beyond that consciousness. I am in it as the witness. I am beyond it as Being.

To be a living being is not the ultimate state; there is something beyond, much more wonderful, which is neither being nor non-being, neither living nor non-living. It is a state of pure awareness, beyond the limitations of space and time. Once the illusion that the body-mind is oneself is abandoned, death loses its terror, it becomes a part of living.

The witness only registers events. In the abeyance of the mind even the sense 'I am' dissolves. There is no 'I am' without the mind.

You live, you feel, you think. By giving attention to your living, feeling and thinking, you free yourself from them and go beyond them. Your personality dissolves and only the witness remains. Then you go beyond the witness. Do not ask how it happens. Just search within yourself.

All I can say truly is: 'I am', all else is inference. But the inference has become a habit. Destroy all habits of thinking and seeing. The sense 'I am' is the manifestation of a deeper cause, which you may call Self, God, Reality or by any other name. The 'I am' is in the world; but it is the key which can open the door out of the world. The moon dancing on the water is seen in the water, but it is caused by the moon in the sky and not by the water.

As long as we imagine ourselves to be separate personalities, one quite apart from another, we cannot grasp reality which is essentially impersonal. First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centres of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness, which is both mind and matter and beyond both.

Have you felt the all-embracing emptiness in which the universe swims like a cloud in the blue sky?

This 'I am' is an announcement: it is not the real. It has come out of something else. What the real is, I am not telling you, because words negate that. Whatever I am telling you is not the truth, because it has come out of that 'I am'. The fact is, I cannot describe reality to you, I cannot explain it, because it is beyond expression.

When you pursue the spiritual path, the path of self-knowing, all your desires, all your attachments, will just drop away, provided you investigate and hold on to that with which you are trying to understand the self. Then what happens? Your 'I-am-ness' is the state 'to be'. You are 'to be' and attached to that state. You love to be. Now, as I said, ... your desires drop off. And what is the primary desire? To be. When you stay put in that beingness for some time, that desire also will drop off. This is very important. When this is dropped off, you are in the Absolute -- a most essential state.

When you are in consciousness, you understand the nature of consciousness and you recede. Your progress continues. This consciousness is slowly extinguishing itself; knowingly it is disappearing. But nothing affects You, because that is the Absolute. Just like when the flame is gone, the smoke is gone, the sky remains.

Take one sentence of what has been said here, and stay with it. That is enough; that will lead you to your source. 

The Nisargadatta Song of Beyond I Am: Selections from "The Wisdom of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj", by Robert Powell

Spiritual maturity is being ready to let go everything. Giving up is a first step, but real giving-up is the insight that there's nothing to be given up, since nothing is your property.
When you know thoughts and their wonderful powers, and liberate them from what has poisoned them - the idea of an own, separate person -, you just let them alone, such that they can perform their appropriate work. Letting the thoughts do their own work at their own place is freedom.
When you don't require anything from the world and nothing from God, when you don't desire anything, when you don't strive for anything, don't expect anything, the divine will enter you, unasked and unex-pected.
The wish for truth is the best of all wishes, but it's still a wish. All wishes must be given up, that the truth can enter your life.
When you encounter sorrow and suffering, remain with it and don't try to escape from it. Don't throw yourself into blind activity. Neither learning nor acting can really help. Be with the presence of sorrow and uncover their roots - help with insight is real help.

Understanding confusion means becoming free of it.

The world and the thinking are states of being. The divine is not a state, it penetrates all states, but is no state of anything else.
Nothing extraordinary can happen to a consciousness knowing exactly what it wants.
Delayed reaction is wrong reaction. Thinking, feeling and action must be a unity and happen together with the situation requiring them.
What is the worth of a happiness for which you must strive and work? Real happiness is spontaneous and effortless.
In my view, everything happens by itself, quite spontaneously. But humans think they would work for a win, towards a purpose.
There's nothing from which the world could profit more than from giving up profit. A man who's no longer thinking in terms of winning and loosing is truly non-violent man, since he's above all conflicts.
It's the nature of thinking to differentiate things and specialize itself. There's no harm to that, but it isn't true when one thinks of oneself as separate from things. Things and humans are different, but not separate. Nature is one, reality is one. There are opposites, but no contradictions.
You will receive everything you need when you stop asking for what you do not need.
There's no state in which one is seeing reality. WHO is seeing WHAT? You can only BE real. (And that you are always.) The problem exists only in thinking. Let all false ideas go, that's all. There's no need for true ideas. (Since there are none.)

Suffering is exclusively the result of attachment or resistance, it is a sign of lacking readiness to go on, to flow with life.

edited by  Jerry Katz

source http://www.nonduality.com/beyond.htm

Chuck Surface - Surrendered

 

Buddha experienced what he called “enlightenment”,
And at first, thought it impossible to convey.
But entreated by old friends,
Was convinced to speak. 

Moved by Compassion, he struggled,
To describe his Subjective Experience,
To point the way for others,
So their suffering, too, might end. 

And so with all great teachers,
And all great teachings,
Experience, Interpretation, description,
Followed by prescriptions and proscriptions. 

Heaven, Nirvana, Enlightenment,
Is thus, they say.
To come to it,
Do thus, not thus. 

And thus…
The many paths are born.
Many paths…
Many Ways. 

First, the experience described,
It's value conveyed,
And then the Way explained,
The moon reflected in water. 

If enlightenment was not described,
How would any know of it,
And why it should be sought,
Among the 10,000 allures. 

If a Way is not shown,
A Way cannot be followed,
To the end of suffering,
And the advent of Satchitananda. 

Buddha interpreted his experience thus,
Shankara thus, Mahavir thus,
Lao Tzu thus, Bodhidharma thus,
And on and on… and on. 

Experience,
Interpretation,
Expression. 

And in most instances,
So much more, heaped upon the essence;
Entire cosmologies formed,
Complex descriptions of “reality”. 

So many teachers,
So many teachings,
All expressing The Way,
With certitude and authority. 

And those who seek desperately,
A mirroring of clarity and context,
Search the words of those dead and living,
For some reflection…
Of their own unique Experience of Being.


They seek clarification of confusions,
Context, understanding… deepening,
Regarding the Great Mystery unfolding…
In their own unique Experience of Being. 

Here and there they find affinity,
In the experiences of others,
The interpretations of others,
The expressions of others. 

Wherever I searched,
In the teachings of others,
I found only pieces, more or less so…
Of my own unique Experience of Being. 

Among friends, as well, met along the Way,
I saw the taking of this, and discarding of that
As each piece fit, more or less so…
Their own unique Experience of Being. 

Gods and Goddesses,
Masters, Gurus, Saints,
Each reflecting this facet or that,
Of this incomprehensible Diamond. 

Each a beautiful reflection,
Each a useful teaching,
Each…
A partiality. 

A partiality. 

Finding no refuge whole and complete,
In this view or that,
I fell down where I stood, Homeless…
In the Infinitude of incomprehensibility. 

Surrender… 

Far from the Village of the Known,
Road vanished into path,
Path vanished into hillside,
Hillside vanished into Vastness,
Vastness vanished into… 

My Sat Guru,
My Heart,
Could offer no guidance,
Except… 

Surrender… 

Complete,
Absolute,
Across… the… Whole… of… Being… 

Surrender… 

The mind having reached the end of its ability,
Too intoxicated, too drunk with Amrita,
To understand or comprehend… anything at all. 

Surrender… 

To a Heart Shining, beyond all understanding,
With the Ecstasy of Heaven,
And Filled to overflowing, with Causeless Love. 

Surrender… 

To Grace… Unearned, Unmerited,
Born of the simple fact,
Of Existing…

Surrendered. 

http://gardenofthebeloved.com/

Ilsa Comte Adair - Awareness Meditation

Make no effort to meditate 

Make no effort to not meditate

Make no effort to make no effort 

Being is not something 

One does

Being is what

One is.

 -Wu Hsin

Love, compassion and acceptance are not acts that we do, but qualities that we are. The same is true of meditation. Meditation is not an action, it is literally the cessation of all actions, it is Awareness, the sense of Being, pure and uncluttered, open to and intimate with all that is.

The natural state of awareness is to be wide open, clear and vast. Life emerges out of this Aware Field. Awareness recognizes that all that exist is simply an expression and extension of itself. From that stance, Awareness turns away from nothing and resists nothing since everything is itself. Aware Presence is intimately open and one with everything that arises. Meditation is the art of consciously dropping into and becoming that aware field. When we get lost in a thought or a sensation, then we have simply referred back to the focusing habit of the mind and the expansiveness of Awareness has been veiled rather than staying open to the totality of our experience. When we are grabbed by a thought or an ache, everything else disappears. The felt sense of being the vast open space of Awareness seems to be lost, all the sounds, all the smells and the more subtle sensations in our body are also absent from our experience. Suddenly we become this thought, this ache, and forget the expansive reality of our Being.

We seem to have lost, except for small moments here and there, the ability to be present and open to all of life, not just one small aspect of it. To make matters worse, our focused attention is often put on the very things we find disturbing in our lives such as our constant pesky thoughts, our annoying neighbor, our traumas, our disappointments, our fears, our resistance, our discomfort and our desires. Is it really all that surprising that we are unhappy, stuck, lost and blind to our way home?

All we have to do is move our eyes away from what blinds us, step back, widen our focus and see that there is so much more to us and to life than previously believed, that home is right here and now, that we've, in fact, never left, but were blinded by the object of our focus. Not unlike being blinded by the sun when we look straight at it. We don't need to look directly at the sun to see it, the sun is everywhere, reflected in everything we see. there is no need to direct our attention on one point of focus, all we need to do is relax, ease back, rest in what is and become aware of our own spaciousness and ever present awareness. We realize that the warmth and light of our own Being, just like the sun, is everywhere. We Realize that we don't need to stare at the sun to feel its warmth and see its light, we can effortlessly loosen up and discover that warmth and light is everywhere and in everything.

In this type of meditation, we learn to take a step back,  and to open our senses and our heart. In this form meditation we come back to our vastness and to the qualities of our Absolute Self over and over: boundless, present, aware, open, still, welcoming, authentic, primary and unaffected. You are That!

 Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.
And of course be free! Free to be as you are in all that you are and to
Experience this moment and the next in its completeness.

 

 

http://www.ilsacomte.com/ 

 

https://www.facebook.com/ilsacomte 

 

Jiddu Krishnamurti - Nothingness as you

"You are nothing. You may have your name and title, your property and bank account, you may have power and be famous; but in spite of all these safeguards, you are as nothing. You may be totally unaware of this emptiness, this nothingness, or you may simply not want to be aware of it; but it is there, do what you will to avoid it. You may try to escape from it in devious ways, through personal or collective violence, through individual or collective worship, through knowledge or amusement; but whether you are asleep or awake, it is always there. You can come upon your relationship to this nothingness and its fear only by being choicelessly aware of the escapes. You are not related to it as a separate, individual entity; you are not the observer watching it; without you, the thinker, the observer, it is not. You and nothingness are one; you and nothingness are a joint phenomenon, not two separate processes. If you, the thinker, are afraid of it and approach it as something contrary and opposed to you, then any action you may take towards it must inevitably lead to illusion and so to further conflict and misery. When there is the discovery, the experiencing of that nothingness as you, then fear -which exists only when the thinker is separate from his thoughts and so tries to establish a relationship with them- completely drops away."

 

 

Ramana Maharshi - That inner Self

‘That inner Self, as the primeval Spirit,

 

Eternal, ever effulgent, full and infinite Bliss,

Single, indivisible, whole and living,

Shines in everyone as the witnessing awareness.

That self in its splendour, shining in the cavity of the heart

This self is neither born nor dies,

Neither grows nor decays, 

Nor does it suffer any change.

When a pot is broken, the space within it is not, 

And similarly, when the body dies the Self in it remains eternal.”

 ‿︵︵‿︵︵‿︵༺♥༻ ‿︵︵‿︵︵‿︵

http://www.sriramanamaharshi.org/ramana-maharshi/ 

Adyashanti - Love

“Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfillment of all that is true….

True Love is far greater than anything that could be called personal. True Love is a non-personal miracle. It is the nature of reality itself. It is the natural and spontaneous expression of the undivided self……

Intuition of this degree of Love magnetically draws the individual toward it, and at the same time, causes fear to arise. This Love is seeking the dissolution of all separateness, all me-ness, all self concern…..

Love cares not for the me, it cares only for that which is true, undivided and whole.When the me dissolves, when it surrenders itself to a unity far greater than anything the mind can comprehend, that is Love…..

Non-personal Love is not a feeling, yet within it there can be, and there is, feeling and emotion. But the feeling and emotion are not derived from a personal me. The feeling and emotion are derived from the absence of a personal me…..

‘There is profound responsibility in being Love,’ …more than the mind could imagine or hold up under. If most human beings truly realized the impact that they have on the whole, they’d be crushed by the realization of it.”

‿︵︵‿︵︵‿︵༺♥༻ ‿︵︵‿︵︵‿︵

“The Impact of Awakening”

 http://www.adyashanti.org/

Roy Melvyn - Observe

The Absolute is that from which everything emanates. The Conscious Life Energy is Its primary emanation. If you need to have a God, then let the Conscious Life Energy be your God. It supports and sustains you and this conforms with God’s usual job description.

You can’t talk about Consciousness and non-duality. Duality is Consciousness, experiencing Itself as other than Itself via the creation of a unique viewpoint, you.
In this realm of duality, there is the Perceiving and the perceived, with the perceiver being the instrument of the Perceiving. So be clear that the perceiver is not the subject, but the vehicle through which Perceiving functions.

Understand this and you are halfway to realization. The other half of the way is being the understanding. Being the understanding means living the understanding. It also means surrendering the ultimate outcome to some force external to your seeming self.

Then, you do not occupy yourself with what you should do from morning to night. Trust that whatever arises will be addressed. Observe, observe, observe, until the Observing stands clearly and continuously apart from the observed.

Roy Melvyn site 

http://www.roymelvyn.com/

Kahlil Gibran - of Beauty

Art Reza Badrossama

And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.

And he answered:

Where shall you seek beauty, and how 

shall you find her unless she herself be your

way and your guide?

And how shall you speak of her except 

she be the weaver of your speech?

The aggrieved and injured say, 

"Beauty is kind and gentle."

The tired and weary say,

"Beauty is of soft whisperings

She speaks in our spirit."

In winter say the snow-bound,

"She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills."

All these things have you said of beauty,

Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,

And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy. 

It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,

But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.

It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,

But rather an image you see, though you

close your eyes and a song you hear, though

you shut your ears.

People of Orphalese, 

beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.

But you are life and you are the veil.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

 ♡

 from The Prophet

Eckhart Tolle - The Voice in the Head

The single most important step in your journey toward enlightenment is to learn to dis-identify from your thinking mind.

The thinking mind is a very busy component of our consciousness. It’s constantly labeling, judging, defining, conceptualizing, covering the world up with words rather than allowing you to experience the world directly through presence. 

The thinking mind is a chatterbox that is constantly making commentary on every little detail of our experience, robbing us of a still and receptive state of being that experiences life with an open curiosity that makes the world a living reality that is miraculous and magnificent.

When we are identified with our thinking mind, our experience of life is constricted and limited to an opaque screen of words, images, concepts and labels – second-hand representations of life that might as well be a movie on a screen.

When you create even a momentary gap in the incessant thinking and chatter taking place in your mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. The world around you becomes more vibrant and real. 

Your experience of life is direct and alive, you are present in your experience, and thus you are able to touch life directly. This is called direct experience. Experience without words or labels.

Make a practice to create these momentary gaps in thinking as many times a day as you can. It doesn’t matter of your gap is long. One minute is good enough. It’s the number of times you cease the chatter and noise of the thinking mind that matters. The more you do this, the more you dis-identify.

One day you may even find yourself smiling at this voice in your head as though it were a child misbehaving. This is good, it means you are taking the content of your mind less seriously. And you are recognizing that the content of your mind is not you. 

You don’t depend on it for your sense of self. You are beginning to identify with something else within your consciousness, with your source and essence, with the presence of your being.

This is the state we wish to cultivate.

 https://www.eckharttolle.com/

Robert Wolfe - Not Knowing

The realization, which one has in Self-realization, is not an experience. And, contrary to being a "knowing," it is an un-knowing.

The reason why this can be said is because Self-realization is merely a profound insight into the total and complete absence of limitation. In other words, it is entirely outside the bounds of both experience and knowledge.

In fact, to the Self-realized, the word which comes closest (to the condition described above) is nothingness.

In actuality, it is not a matter of "knowing Oneness" or "experiencing sublime consciousness." It is an irrepressible realization that the ultimate condition is of no-thing; nothing.

In other words, in this absolute awareness there is not any thing about which we suppose we will be certain, as a conceiver knows a concept.

It may sound peculiar, but this is the Self-realized state.

 free download "Living nonduality" PDF HERE

Robert site http://www.livingnonduality.org/home.htm